1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system for supporting a variety of operations, such as a home-based medical treatment such as house call, nursing, home-help, rehabilitation, and home-based cares, maintenance operations such as plants, and guarding operations.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, portable information communication terminals (Personal Digital Assistants; PDA) have been successively developed by manufacturers. The portable information communication terminals are compact and light enough to carry daily and can manage personal information and communicate information the user obtains at any place he is visiting, through a telephone line or the like. On the other hand, portable telephone have entered into common use in recent years, and simple portable telephones (Personal Handyphone System; PHS) have just been developed. Generalization of radio telephones and data communication are thereby further accelerated. There is the trend that a function similar to that is imparted to the PHS, enabling the PHS to serve as a radio data communication terminal.
Among these communication terminals, a terminal developed recently which can treat various types of information such as image, voice and the like, as well as conventional character information. A color image can be recorded in full color with high definition, composed of about 410,000 pixels, by a compact digital still camera. The image information thus obtained can be inputted to said terminal. An illustration, memorandum and so forth can be written onto the image in a bit map format. The image can be linked to a memorandum or the like to which voice information is simultaneously written.
A rapid increase in the number of house patients is expected as the percentage of the elderly increases in the near future. In this case, it is anticipated that problems of an increase in burden of home-help and insufficiency of man power become serious. The Ministry of Health and Welfare of Japan made a "gold plan" and a "new gold plan" to enlarge facilities such as health facilities for the old, and to increase the number of home helpers. According to these plans, institutionalized visiting nursing stations function as bases of the home-based medical treatment. Enlargements of man power and supporting facilities such as 10,000 home helper stations are further expected.
The physical burden of a person in charge of the home-based care is heavy as long as the care is performed such that the person in charge visits the patient's house. In particular, it is necessary that the home-based care is at least equal to the care which can be given to the patient who is in the hospital. Accordingly, a support in an all-day system is indispensable, but there is a physical limit in continuous attendance of one person in charge of the patient. Accordingly, rotational care and a rotation system of plural persons in charge are indispensable. At this time, if no information of the state of the patient, contents of treatment and so forth obtainable from visiting is shared by the persons in charge, each person in charge cannot obtain information of the patient when they are off duty. As a result, continuous and uniform care cannot sufficiently be given to the patient. In the case of nursing in a hospital, information can be shared attributable to periodical conference, cyclic transference of information and so forth. However, since the home-based care is performed such that a person in charge visits the patient's home, conference cannot frequently be held, thus resulting in a problem to arise in that information cannot easily be shared. What is worse, in the case of the home-based care in which various persons such as a visiting nurse, a home helper, a doctor, etc. alternately visit the patient, information cannot easily be shared among the foregoing persons in charge.
Such problems are not limited to home-based care, but are common to a system for supporting various operations for mobile workers in which a team of persons in charge is organized and the persons in charge alternately go to a destination as in a maintenance operation of a plant or the like, a maintenance service operation, a guarding operation of a building or the like, business or the like, and persons other than the person in charge take charge of such operations in an emergency situation.